Generally printers used by higher education institutions and corporate organizations are connected to an internal or local network so that the printers may be shared between the users, i.e. the students and staff or workers.
In order to control access as well as to control or limit the costs associated with printing, document management or print accounting systems, collectively referred to as authenticated printing systems, are used for tracking and accounting for printing activity. Print activity tracking and accounting is typically based on a user's network username. For this to work, each print job should comprise the user's network username in the print job details. Accordingly when a user prints a document from his personal computer, PC, the print job generated from the document has the user's network username in the job details or print job metadata, e.g. in the header of the print job file, for use by the authenticated printing systems. When the user prints from a conventional PC, the network user name is readily available for incorporation in the print job details as the user typically logs on onto the PC, and onto the local network to which the PC is connected, using the network user name.
Driven by the desire to facilitate printing, in particular the desire to avoid needing to install printer driver software on each PC and the need for providing printing from mobile devices such as smart phones, mobile phones, tablet PCs, etc., so called “Cloud Printing” technologies, one example being Google Cloud Print™, have been devised. “Cloud” in “Cloud Printing” is related to the concept of Cloud Computing, which comprises network based services provided by virtual servers running and distributed on one or more real servers.
Thus a cloud printing service may receive print jobs from various types of clients, such as PCs, mobile phones, tablet computers, thin client PCs or packaged laptops such as a Chromebook™, i.e. a laptop running Chrome OS™. Further, a print job submitted to a cloud printing service may also originate in an entirely Web-based application such as the word processing and spreadsheet applications known as Google Docs™. Print jobs may also be submitted to the cloud printing service as documents of various file types, examples being Microsoft® word documents and Microsoft® Excel® documents etc., which generally are not easily acceptable by the printers themselves.
Once the cloud printing service has received the print job, it converts the print job into a language understandable by the printer and sends it to a cloud aware printer, i.e. a printer being connectable to the cloud printing service and capable of receiving the print job therefrom, for printing.
In this way printing is made more easy, as there is no need for printer drivers on the client (as conversion is made by the cloud printing service), and there is no need for printer servers (as each printer individually, being cloud aware, connects to the cloud printing service to retrieve print jobs for printing.)
Techniques for printing print jobs submitted to a cloud printing service are known from inter alia US2013083353A1, US2013100480A1, U.S. Pat. No. 8,531,711B2, US2012188600A1, US2012206765A1, US2013135665A1, US2013114107A1 and US2013148145A1.